Yet he had already given it up, hadn’t he? By shedding his identity as a Knight of the Word, he had given it up. She knew the truth of things. People changed. Lives took strange turns.
“The Lady sent me to ask you to go to John Ross and warn him one final time.”
Ariel’s words jarred her. Nest stared in disbelief. “Me? Why would he listen to me?”
“The Lady says you hold a special place in his heart.” Ariel said it in a matter-of-fact way, as if Nest ought to know what this would mean. “She believes that John Ross will listen to you, that he trusts and respects you, and that you have the best chance of persuading him of the danger he faces.”
Nest shook her head stubbornly. “I wouldn’t know what to say. I’m not the right choice for this.” She hesitated. “Look, the truth is, I’m not even sure how I feel about John Ross. Where is he, anyway?”
“Seattle.”
“Seattle? You want me to go all the way out to Seattle?” Nest was aghast. “I’m in school! I’ve got classes tomorrow!”
Ariel stared at her in silence, and suddenly Nest was aware of how foolish she sounded. The tatterdemalion was telling her John Ross was in danger, his life was at risk, she might have a chance to help him, and she was busy worrying about missing a few classes. It was more than that, of course, but it hadn’t come out sounding that way.
“This is a lot of nonsense!” Pick stormed suddenly, leaping to his feet on her shoulder. “Nest Freemark is needed here, with me! Who knows what could happen to her out there! After what she went through with her father, she shouldn’t have to go anywhere!”
“Pick, relax,” Nest soothed.
“Criminy!” Pick was not about to relax. “Why can’t the Lady go herself? Why can’t she speak to Ross? She’s the one who recruited him, isn’t she? Why can’t she send one of her other people, another Knight, maybe?”
“She has already done what she could,” Ariel answered, her strange voice calm and distant, her slight form ephemeral in the changing light. “She has sent others to speak for her. He ignores them all. He is lost to himself, locked away by his choice to abandon his charge, and given over to his doom.” Her childlike hand gestured. “There is only Nest.”
“Well, she’s not going!” Pick declared firmly. “So that’s it for John Ross, I guess. Thanks for coming, but I think you’d better be on your way.”
“Pick!” Nest admonished, surprised at his vehemence. “Be nice, will you?” She looked at Ariel. “What happens if I don’t go?” she asked.
Ariel’s strange eyes, clear as stream water, locked on her own. “John Ross has had a dream. The events of the dream will occur in three days. On the last day of October. On Halloween. Ross will be a part of these events. To the extent that he is, there is a very great chance he will become ensnared by the Void and will begin to turn. The Lady cannot know this for certain, but she suspects it. She will not let that happen. She has already sent someone to see that it doesn’t.”
Nest felt a chill sweep through her. Like she sent Ross to me, five years ago. If Ross is subverted, he will be killed. Someone has been sent to see to it.
“You are his last chance,” Ariel said again. “Will you go to him? Will you speak to him? Will you try to save him?”
Her thin voice drifted on the autumn breeze and was lost in a rustle of dry leaves.
Nest walked back through the park, lost in thought. Pick rode her shoulder in silence. The afternoon was lengthening out from midday, and the park was busy with fall picnickers, hikers, a few stray pickup ballplayers, and parents with kids and dogs. The blue skies were still bright with sunshine, but the sun was easing steadily west toward a large bank of storm clouds that were rolling out of the plains. Nest could smell the coming rain in the soft, cool air.
“What are you going to do?” Pick asked finally.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You’re seriously thinking about going, aren’t you?” “I’m thinking about it.”
“Well, you should forget about it right here and now.”
“Why do you feel so strongly about this?” She slowed in the shadow of a large oak and looked down at him. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
Pick’s wooden face twisted in an expression of distaste, and his twiggy body contorted into a knot. His eyes looked straight ahead. “Nothing.”
She waited, knowing from experience that there would be more.
“You remember what happened five years ago,” Pick said finally, still not looking at her. “You remember what that was like—with John Ross and your grandparents and your … You remember?” He shook his head. “It wasn’t any of it what it seemed to be at first glance. It wasn’t any of it what you thought it was. There were things you didn’t know. Things I didn’t know, for that matter. Secrets. It was over before you found out everything.”
He paused. “It will be like that with this business, too. It always is. The Word doesn’t reveal everything. It isn’t His nature to do so.”
Something was being hidden from her; Pick could sense it, even if he couldn’t identify what it was. Maybe so. Maybe it was even something that could hurt her. But it didn’t change what was happening to John Ross. It didn’t change what was being asked of her. Did she have the right to use it as a reason for not going?
She tried a different tack. “Ariel says she will go with me, that she will help me.”
Pick snorted. “Ariel is a tatterdemalion. How much help can she be? She’s made out of air and lost memories. She’s only alive for a heartbeat. She doesn’t know anything about humans and their problems. Tatterdemalions come together mostly by chance, wander about like ghosts, and then disappear again. She’s a messenger, nothing more.”
“She says she can serve as a guide for me. She says that the Lady has sent her for that purpose.”
“The blind leading the blind, as your grandmother used to say.” Pick was having none of it.
Nest angled through the trees, bypassing the picnickers and ballplayers, turning up the service road that ran along the backside of the residences bordering the park. Her mind spun in a jumble of concerns and considerations. This was not going to be an easy decision to make.
“Would you come with me?” she asked suddenly.
Pick went still, stiffening. He didn’t say anything for a moment, then muttered in a barely audible voice, “Well, the fact of the matter is, I’ve never been out of the park.”
She was surprised, although she shouldn’t have been. Why would Pick ever have gone anywhere else? What would have taken him away? The park was his home, his work, his life. He was telling her, without quite speaking the words, that the idea of leaving was frightening to him.
She had embarrassed him, she realized.
“Well, I’m being selfish asking you to go,” she said quickly, as if brushing her suggestion aside. “Who would look after the park if you weren’t here? It’s bad enough that I’m gone so much of the time. But if you left, there wouldn’t be anyone to keep an eye on things, would there?”
Pick shook his head quickly. “True enough. No one at all. It’s a big responsibility.”
She nodded. “Just forget I said anything.”
She turned down the service road toward home. Shadows were already beginning to lengthen, the days growing shorter with winter’s approach. They spread in black pools from the trees and houses, staining the lawns and roadways and walks. A Sunday type of silence cloaked the park, sleepy and restful. Sounds carried a long way. She could hear voices discussing dinner from one of the houses to her right. She could hear laughter and shouts from off toward the river, down below the bluff where children were playing. She could hear the deep bark of a dog in the woods east.
“I could do this trip in a day and be back,” she said, trying out the idea on him. “I could fly out, talk to him, and fly right back.”
Pick did not respond. She walked down the roadway with him in silence.
She sat insi
de by herself afterward, staring out through the curtains, thinking the matter over. Clouds masked the sky beyond, and rain was starting to fall in scattered drops. The people in the park had gone home. Lights were beginning to come on in the windows of the houses across Woodlawn Road.
What should I do?
John Ross had always been an enigma. Now he was a dilemma as well, a responsibility she did not want. He had been living in Seattle for over a year, working for a man named Simon Lawrence at a place called Fresh Start. She remembered both the man and the place from a report someone had done in one of her classes last year. Fresh Start was a shelter for battered and homeless women, founded several years ago by Lawrence. He had also founded Pass/Go, a transitional school for homeless children. The success of both had been something of a celebrity cause for a time, and Simon Lawrence had been labeled the Wizard of Oz. Oz, because Seattle was commonly known as the Emerald City. Now John Ross was there, working at the shelter. So Ariel had informed her.
Nest scuffed at the floor idly with her tennis shoe and tried to picture Ross as a Munchkin in the employ of the great and mighty Oz.
Oh, God. What should I do?
She had told Ariel she would think about it, that she would decide by evening. Ariel would return for her answer then.
She got up and walked into the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot tea. As she stood by the stove waiting for the kettle to boil, she glanced over at the real estate papers for the sale of the house. She had forgotten about them. She stared at them, but made no move to pick them up. They didn’t seem very important in light of the John Ross matter, and she didn’t want to think about them right now. Allen Kruppert and ERA Realty would just have to wait.
Standing at the living room picture window, holding her steaming cup of tea in front of her, she watched the rain begin to fall in earnest, streaking the glass, turning the old shade trees and the grass dark and shiny. The feeders would come out to prowl in this weather, bolder when the light was poor and the shadows thick. They preferred the night, but a gloomy day would do just as well. She still watched for them, not so much afraid anymore as curious, always thinking she would solve their mystery somehow, that she would discover what they were. She knew what they did, of course; she understood their place in nature’s scheme. No one else even knew they were out there. But there was so much more—how they procreated, what they were composed of, how they could inflict madness, how they could appear as shadows and still affect things of substance. She remembered them touching her when her father had made her a prisoner in the caves below the park. She remembered the horror and disgust that blossomed within her. She remembered how badly she had wanted to scream.
But her friends and her grandparents had been there to save her, and now only the memory remained.
Maybe it was her turn to be there for John Ross.
Her brow furrowed. No matter how many ways she looked at the problem, she kept coming back to the same thing. If something happened to John Ross and she hadn’t tried to prevent it, how could she live with herself? She would always wonder if she might have changed things. She would always live in doubt. If she tried and failed, well, at least she would have tried. But if she did nothing …
She sipped at her tea and stared out the window fixedly. John Ross, the Knight of the Word. She could not imagine him ever being different from what he had been five years ago. She could not imagine him being anything other than what he was. How had he fallen so far away from his fierce commitment to saving the world? It sounded overblown when she said it, but that was what he was doing. Saving the world, saving humanity from itself. O’olish Amaneh had made it plain to her that such a war was taking place, even before Ross had appeared to confirm it. We are destroying ourselves, Two Bears had told her; we are risking the fate of the Sinnissippi—that we shall disappear completely and no one will know who we were.
Are we still destroying ourselves? she wondered. Are we still traveling the road of the Sinnissippi? She hadn’t thought about it for a long time, wrapped up in her own life, the events of five years earlier behind her, buried in a past she would rather forget. She had been only a girl of fourteen. Her world had been saved, and at the time she had been grateful enough to let it go at that.
But her world was expanding now, reaching out to places and people beyond Hopewell. What was happening in that larger world, the world into which her future would take her? What would become of it without John Ross?
Rain coated the windows in glistening sheets that turned everything beyond into a shimmering haze. The park and her backyard disappeared. The world beyond vanished.
She walked to the phone and dialed Robert Heppler. He answered on the fourth ring, sounding distracted. “Yeah, hello?”
“Back on the computer, Robert?” she asked teasingly.
“Nest?”
“Want to go out for a pizza later?”
“Well, yeah, of course.” He was alert and eager now, if surprised. “When?”
“In an hour. I’ll pick you up. But there’s a small price for this.”
“What is it?”
“You have to drive me to O’Hare tomorrow morning. I can go whenever you want, and you can use my car. Just bring it back when you’re done and park it in the drive.”
She didn’t know how Ariel would get to Seattle, but she didn’t think it was something she needed to worry about. The Lady’s creatures seemed able to get around just fine without any help from humans.
She waited for Robert to say something. There was a long pause before he did. “O’Hare? Where are you going?”
“Seattle.”
“Seattle?”
“The Emerald City, Robert.”
“Yeah, I know what it’s called. Why are you going there?”
She sighed and stared off through the window into the rainy gloom. “I guess you could say I’m off to see the Wizard.” She paused for effect. “Bye, Robert.”
Then she hung up.
Monday,
October 29
Chapter 6
John Ross finished the closing paragraph of Simon’s Seattle Art Museum speech, read it through a final time to make certain it all hung together, dropped his pen, and leaned back in his chair with a satisfied sigh. Not bad. He was getting pretty good at this speech-writing business. It wasn’t what Simon had hired him for, but it looked like it was a permanent part of his job description now. All those years he had spent knocking around in graduate English programs were serving a useful purpose after all. He grinned and glanced out the window of his tiny office. Morning rain was giving way to afternoon sun. Overhead, the drifting clouds were beginning to reveal small patches of blue. Just another typical Seattle day.
He glanced at the clock on his desk and saw that it was nearing three. He had been at this since late morning. Time for a break.
He pushed back his chair and levered himself to his feet. He was three years beyond forty, but when rested he could easily pass for ten years less. Lean and fit, he had the sun-browned, rawboned look of an outdoorsman, his face weathered, yet still boyish. His long brown hair was tied back with a rolled bandanna, giving him the look of a man who might not be altogether comfortable with the idea of growing up. Pale green eyes looked out at the world as if still trying to decide what to make of it.
And, indeed, John Ross had been working on deciphering the meaning of life for a long time.
He stood with his hand gripping the polished walnut staff that served as his crutch, wondering again what would happen if he simply cast it away, if he defied the warning that had accompanied its bestowal and cut loose his final tie to the Word. He had considered it often in the last few months, thinking there was no reason for further delay and he should simply make the decision and act on it. But he could never quite bring himself to carry through, even though he was no longer a Knight of the Word and the staff’s power was no longer a part of his life.
He ran his fingers slowly up and down the smooth wood, trying to detect
whether he was still bound to it. But the staff revealed nothing. He did not even know if the magic it contained was still his to command; he no longer felt its warmth or saw its gleam in the wood’s dark surface. He no longer sensed its presence.
He closed his eyes momentarily. He had wanted his old life back, the one he had given up to become a Knight of the Word. He had been willing to risk everything to regain it. And perhaps, he thought darkly, he had done exactly that. The Word, after all, was the Creator. What did the Creator feel when you told Him you wanted to back out of an agreement? Maybe Ross would never know. What he did know was that his life was his own again, and he would not let go of it easily. The staff, he reasoned, looking warily at it, was a reminder of what it would mean for him if he did.
Raised voices, high-pitched and tearful, chased Della Jenkins down the hall. Della swept past his doorway, muttering to herself, giving him a frustrated shake of her head. She was back a moment later, returning the way she had come, a clutch of papers in one hand. Curious, he trailed after her up the hallway to the lobby at the front of the old building, taking his time, leaning on his staff for support. Della was working the reception desk today, and Mondays were always tough. More things seemed to happen over the weekend than during the week—confrontations of all sorts, exploding out of pressure cookers that had been on low boil for weeks or months or even years. He could never understand it. Why such things were so often done on a weekend was a mystery to him. He always thought a Friday would do just as well, but maybe weekends for the battered and abused were bridges to the new beginnings that Mondays finally required.
By the time Ross reached the lobby, the voices had died away. He paused in the doorway and peeked out guardedly. Della was bent close to a teenage girl who had collapsed in a chair to one side of the reception desk and begun to cry. A younger girl was clinging tightly to one arm, tears streaking her face. Della’s hand was resting lightly on the older girl’s shoulder, and she was speaking softly in her ear. Della was a large woman with big hair, skin the color of milk chocolate, and a series of dresses that seemed to come only in primary colors. She had both a low, gentle voice and a formidable glare, and she was adept at bringing either to bear as the situation demanded. In this instance, she seemed to have abandoned the latter in favor of the former, and already the older girl’s sobs were fading. A handful of women and children occupied chairs in other parts of the room. A few were looking over with a mix of curiosity and sympathy. New arrivals, applying for a bed. When they saw Ross, the women went back to work on their application forms and the children shifted their attention to him. He gave them a smile, and one little girl smiled back.